Scientists have discovered a warm and rocky “second Earth” circling a star, a find they believe dramatically boosts the prospects that we are not alone.

The planet is the most Earth-like ever spotted and is thought to have perfect conditions for water, an essential ingredient for life. Researchers detected the planet orbiting one of Earth’s nearest stars, a cool red dwarf called Gliese 581, 20 light years away in the constellation of Libra.

Full Story: The Guardian.

Nigel Willmott at the Guardian asks if Richard Dawkins is the new Martin Luthor:

But one man does not make a revolution – political or intellectual; Luther tapped into all the sources of dissatisfaction in his world and very quickly found enthusiastic adherents. And what is interesting about Dawkins is that there seems to be a growing following for his uncompromising views. Over the past two or three years, for instance, Dawkins’ assaults on religion have generated more letters to the Guardian by far than any other single topic. As the religious communities have united to counterattack, secularists and members of the scientific community have become increasingly strident about “superstitious belief in unverifiable beings in the sky”. From being passive a-theists, they are becoming active anti-theists; no longer just critics of the existing religious superstructure of our world, but iconoclasts seeking to radically change or abolish it.

Full Story: The Guardian.

Remember a few years ago when we reported a shark that was born to a virgin mother? Here’s an update:

Scientists have solved the mystery of how a baby shark appeared in a tank of females without the help of a male: it was a virgin birth. The bonnethead shark was born through “parthenogenesis”, a process where an egg develops into an embryo without being fertilised by sperm.

Virgin births, possible in some birds, amphibians, reptiles and bony fishes, are extremely rare. It had never before been confirmed in cartilaginous fish, such as sharks and rays. The birth, in 2001, astonished scientists as placental animals, including this shark, were thought to need genetic material from sperm and egg to produce viable young.

Full Story: The Guardian.

(Thanks Ulysses Lazarus).

Good story for sure, except that the study in question had nothing to do with mobile phones and was actually investigating the influence of electromagnetic fields, especially those used by cordless phones that work on fixed-line networks, on the learning ability of bees. The small study, according to the researchers who carried it out too small for the results to be considered significant, found that the electromagnetic fields similar to those used by cordless phones may interrupt the innate ability of bees to find the way back to their hive.

Full Story: International Herald Tribune.

(via The Guardian via Robot Wisdom).

While conventional wisdom tells us that things are bad and getting worse, scientists and the science-minded among us see good news in the coming years. That’s the bottom line of an outburst of high-powered optimism gathered from the world-class scientists and thinkers who frequent the pages of Edge, in an ongoing conversation among third culture thinkers (i.e., those scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world who, through their work and expository writing, are taking the place of the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefining who and what we are.)

The 2007 Edge Question marks the 10th anniversary of Edge, which began in December, 1996 as an email to about fifty people. In 2006, Edge had more than five million individual user sessions.

Full Story: The Edge.

Also, The Guardian has coverage.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintainence author Robert Pirsig in what he claims to be his final interview:

? The Buddha resides as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain.

? Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a 30,000 page menu and no food.

? Traditional scientific method has always been, at the very best, 20-20 hindsight. It’s good for seeing where you’ve been. It’s good for testing the truth of what you think you know, but it can’t tell you where you ought to go.

? Why, for example, should a group of simple, stable compounds of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen struggle for billions of years to organise themselves into a professor of chemistry? What’s the motive?

? The only Zen you find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there.

Full Story: the Guardian.

“It’s not about gender,” P-Orridge explains. “Some feel like a man trapped in a woman’s body, others like a woman trapped in a man’s body. The pandrogyne says, I just feel trapped in a body. The body is simply the suitcase that carries us around. Pandrogyny is all about the mind, consciousness.”

[...]

Less surprisingly, for someone who has worn his private preoccupations so publicly, P-Orridge regards pandrogny as a crusade. “It’s inevitable if we’re going to evolve as a species,” he says. “Our perception of the world is binary: right/wrong, black/white, male/female. We live in this miraculous technological environment, and yet our human behaviour is still governed by basic impulses from prehistoric times.” Replication through science, P-Orridge insists, would help change human behaviour completely.

The new Psychic TV album is due out in January of 07, from the Olympia based record label, Kill Rock Stars.

Full Story: Guardian Unlimited.

(via Easy Bake Coven).

The standard big bang theory says the universe began with a massive explosion, but the new theory suggests it is a cyclic event that consists of repeating big bangs.

“People have inferred that time began then, but there really wasn’t any reason for that inference,” said Neil Turok, a theoretical physicist at the University of Cambridge, “What we are proposing is very radical. It’s saying there was time before the big bang.”

Under his theory, published today in the journal Science with Paul Steinhardt at Princeton University in New Jersey, the universe must be at least a trillion years old with many big bangs happening before our own. With each bang, the theory predicts that matter keeps on expanding and dissipating into infinite space before another horrendous blast of radiation and matter replenishes it. “I think it is much more likely to be far older than a trillion years though,” said Prof Turok. “There doesn’t have to be a beginning of time. According to our theory, the universe may be infinitely old and infinitely large.”

Full Story: The Guardian.

Before she died, at the age of 81 in 1944, the Swedish artist Hilma af Klint stipulated that her paintings were not to be shown in public for 20 years after her death. Perhaps she felt that the world was not yet ready for them. In some respects, the world never will be ready for the occult symbolism and spiritualist gibberish that her work was derived from, and from which she gained her inspiration. Although the same peculiar beliefs attend the work of pioneering artists such as Mondrian, Kandinsky and Malevich, they never suggested, as did Af Klint, that their work was guided by an imaginary “leader in the spiritual world”. For Af Klint, this was a certain Ananda, who in 1904 told her “she was to execute paintings on the astral plane”.

Full Story: the Guardian.